“Bill” Kunstler was the flamboyant, contentious, proudly revolutionary lawyer for the Chicago Eight, a handsome man with an unruly mane of black-and-white that was as impressive and iconic as the head of hair on Susan Sontag. What’s it like being the young daughters of this John Brown–like presence?

And later on, how do they feel when their King Lear dad seems to have lost his mind and his way, shifting from defending civil-rights and anti-war cases to becoming the mouthpiece for defiant criminals like the 9/11 terrorists and the Mafia’s John Gotti? This is an impressive documentary, both a telling family document (Emily Kunstler directed, Sarah Kunstler produced) and a deserving tribute to the man who, on his best days, stood up for the prisoners in Attica and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee and marched with Martin Luther King.

A decade of turmoil 9/11 has become such a given — such a fixed star in American culture and politics — that as the tenth anniversary approached, it was easy to imagine we had somehow come to terms with the attacks.

Commemorate 9/11 in your own way Regardless of what you believe about 9/11, it is a day that deserves contemplation and commemoration. Here are some local events before, after, and on the 10th anniversary that will get your blood, brain, or heartstrings moving.

American Idiot rocks out As the crowd spilled in for Tuesday night's Boston premiere of Green Day's American Idiot , necks craned and fingers pointed, mohawked guys in their mid-30s and elderly couples jostled for their seats alongside teenage girls in plaid skirts and suspenders.

REVIEW: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE | March 12, 2013 A decent little movie, but hardly a major one, from Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who, self-exiled, here shoots in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast.

REVIEW: THE GATEKEEPERS | February 26, 2013 Great cinema journalism, The Gatekeepers was the National Society of Film Critics' winner for Best Documentary of 2012.

REVIEW: THE LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953) | February 27, 2013 It's the 60th anniversary of this pioneering American independent feature, which greatly influenced both cinema vérité documentarians and the French New Wave.

REVIEW: HOW TO RE-ESTABLISH A VODKA EMPIRE | February 20, 2013 Daniel Edelstyn launched this film project after reading the spirited diary of his late grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, whose wealthy Jewish family split from Ukraine as the Bolsheviks were taking control.

REVIEW: HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA | February 12, 2013 What Robert Flaherty did with title cards in his silent Nanook of the North , Werner Herzog manages with declamatory voiceover in Happy People : romanticization of the austere, self-reliant lives of hunters and trappers in the icebound north.